Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

The car stopped below her and Rudolph leaped out. Grace, grace. In a fine blue suit. He had a figure for clothes, slender, with wide shoulders and long legs. She pulled back from the window. He had never said anything, but she knew he didn’t like her sitting at the window all day peering out.

She stood up, with an effort, dried her eyes with the edge of her shawl, and hobbled over to a chair near the table which they used for eating. She stubbed out her cigarette as she heard him bounding up the steps.

He opened the door and came in. “Well,” he said, “here it is.” He opened the roll of paper and spread it on the table in front of her. “It’s in Latin,” he said.

She could read his name, in Gothic script.

The tears came again. “I wish I knew your father’s address,” she said. “I’d like him to see this, see what you did without any help from him.”

“Ma,” Rudolph said gently, “he’s dead.”

“That’s what he likes people to believe,” she said. “I know him better than anybody. He’s not dead, he escaped.”

“Ma …” Rudolph said again.

“He’s laughing up his sleeve right this minute,” she said. “They never found the body, did they?”

“Have it your own way,” Rudolph said. “I have to pack a bag. I’m staying in town overnight.” He went into his room and started to throw some shaving things and a pair of pajamas and a clean shirt into a bag. “You got everything you need? Supper?”

“I’ll open a can,” she said. “You going to drive down with that boy in the car?”

“Yes,” he said. “Brad.”

“He’s the one from Oklahoma? The Westerner?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like the way he drives. He’s reckless. I don’t trust Westerners. Why don’t you take the train?”

“What’s the sense in spending money for the train?”

“What good will your money do you if you’re killed, trapped under a car?”

“Ma …”

“And you’ll make plenty of money now. A boy like you. With this.” She, smoothed the stiff paper with the Latin lettering. “Do you ever think of what would happen to me if anything happened to you?”

“Nothing will happen to me.” He clipped the bag shut. He was in a hurry. She saw he was in a hurry. Leave her by the window.

“They will throw me on the garbage heap, like a dog,” she said.

“Ma,” he said, “this is a day for celebration. Rejoicing.”

“I’ll have this framed,” she said. “Enjoy yourself. You earned it. Don’t stay up too late. Where’re you staying in New York? Do you have the phone number, in case there’s an emergency?”

“There won’t be any emergency.”

“In case.”

“Gretchen’s,” he said.

“The harlot,” she said. They did not talk about Gretchen, although she knew he saw her.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. She had gone too far, and she knew it, but she had to make her position clear.

He leaned over and kissed her to say goodbye and to make up for the “Oh, Christ.” She held him. She had doused herself with the toilet water he had bought her for her birthday. She was afraid she smelled like an old woman. “You haven’t told me what your plans were,” she said. “Now your life is really beginning. I thought you would spare me a minute and sit down and tell me what to expect. If you want, I’ll make you a cup of tea …”

“Tomorrow, Ma. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Don’t worry.” He kissed her again and she released him and he was gone, lightfooted, down the stairs. She got up and hobbled over to the window and sat down in her rocking chair, old lady at the window. Let him see her.

The car drove away. He never looked up.

They all leave. Every one of them. Even the best of them.

The Chevy labored up the hill and through the familiar stone gate. The poplar trees that lined the road leading to the house cast a funereal shade, despite the June sunshine. The house quietly decayed behind its unkempt flower borders.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Brad said as he rounded the curve into the courtyard. Rudolph had been to the house so often that he no longer had an opinion of it. It was Teddy Boylan’s house, that was all. “Who lives here—Dracula?”

“A friend,” Rudolph said. He had never spoken about Boylan to Brad. Boylan belonged to another compartment of his life. “A friend of the family. He helped me through school.”

“Dough?” Brad asked, stopping the car and staring critically at the stone pile of the building.

“Some,” Rudolph said. “Enough.”

“Can’t he afford a gardener?”

“He’s not interested. Come on in and meet him. There’s some champagne waiting for us.” Rudolph got out of the car.

“Should I button my collar?” Brad asked.

“Yes,” Rudolph said. He waited while Brad struggled with his collar, and pulled up his tie. He had a thick, short, plebeian neck, Rudolph noticed for the first time.

They crossed the graveled courtyard to the heavy oak front doors. Rudolph rang the bell. He was glad he was not alone. He didn’t want to be alone with Teddy Boylan with the news that he had for him. The bell rang in the muffled distance, a question in a tomb, Are you alive?

The door opened. Perkins stood there. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. There was the sound of the piano being played. Rudolph recognized a Schubert sonata. Teddy Boylan had taken him to concerts at Carnegie Hall and had played a great deal of music for him on his phonograph, pleased at Rudolph’s pleasure in learning about it and his quick ability to tell good playing from bad, mediocre from great. “I was about to give up music before you arrived on the scene,” Boylan had told him once. “I don’t like to listen to it alone and I hate listening to it with people who are faking an interest in it.”

Perkins led the two young men toward the living room. Even in taking five paces, Perkins suggested a procession. Brad straightened out of his usual slouch and walked more erectly, the great dark hall working on him.

Perkins opened the door to the living room. “Mr. Jordache and a friend, sir,” he said.

Boylan finished the passage he was playing and stopped. There was a bottle of champagne in a bucket and two fluted glasses beside it.

Boylan stood up and smiled. “Welcome,” he said, extending his hand to Rudy. “It’s good to see you again.” Boylan had been south for two months and he was very brown, his hair and straight eyebrows sun-bleached. There was some slight little difference in his face that Rudolph puzzled over momentarily, as he shook Boylan’s hand. “May I present a friend of mine,” Rudolph said. “Bradford Knight, Mr. Boylan. He’s a classmate of mine.”

“How do you do, Mr. Knight.” Boylan shook Brad’s hand.

“Happy to make your acquaintance, suh,” Brad said, sounding more Oklahoman than usual.

“You’re to be congratulated today, too, I take it,” Boylan said:

“I reckon so. At least, that’s the theory.” Brad grinned.

“We’ll need a third glass, Perkins.” Boylan moved toward the champagne bucket.

“Yes, sir.” Perkins, leading his lifelong imaginary procession, left the room.

“Was the Democrat edifying?” Boylan asked, twirling the bottle in the ice. “Did he mention malefactors of great wealth?”

“He talked about the bomb,” Rudolph said.

“That Democratic invention,” Boylan said. “Did he say whom we’re going to drop it on next?”

“He didn’t seem to want to drop it on anybody,” Rudolph said. For some reason, Rudolph felt he had to defend the cabinet member. “Actually, he made a great deal of sense.”

“Did he?” Boylan said, twirling the bottle again with the tips of his fingers. “Perhaps he’s a secret Republican.”

Suddenly Rudolph realized what was different about Boylan’s face. There were no more bags under his eyes. He must have got a lot of sleep on his holiday, Rudolph thought.

“You’ve got yourself quite a fine little old place here, Mr. Boylan,” Brad said. He had been staring around him frankly during the conversation.

“Conspicuous consumption,” Boylan said carelessly. “My family was devoted to it. You’re from the South, aren’t you, Mr. Knight?”

“Oklahoma.”

“I drove through it once,” Boylan said. “I found it depressing. Do you plan to go back there now?”

“Tomorrow,” Brad said. “I’ve been trying to get Rudy to go with me.”

“Ah, have you?” Boylan turned to Rudolph. “Are you going?”

Rudolph shook his head.

“No,” Boylan said. “I can’t quite see you in Oklahoma.”

Perkins came in with the third glass and set it down.

“Ah,” said Boylan. “Here we are.” He undid the wire around the cork, his hands working deftly as the wire came away. He twisted the cork gently and as it came out with a dry popping noise he poured the foam expertly into the glasses. Ordinarily, he allowed Perkins to open bottles. Rudolph realized that Boylan was making a special, symbolic effort today.

He handed a glass to Brad and one to Rudolph, then lifted his own. “To the future,” he said. “That dangerous tense.”

“This sure beats Coca-Cola,” Brad said. Rudolph frowned slightly. Brad was being purposely bumpkinish, reacting unfavorably to Boylan’s mannered elegance.

“Yes, doesn’t it?” Boylan said evenly. He turned to Rudolph. “Why don’t we go out into the garden and drink the rest of the bottle in the sunlight? It always seems more festive—drinking wine in the open.”

“Well,” Rudolph said, “we don’t really have much time …”

“Oh?” Boylan raised his eyebrows. “I had thought we could have dinner together at the Farmer’s Inn. You’re invited, too, of course, Mr. Knight.”

“Thank you, suh,” Brad said. “But it’s up to Rudy.”

“There’re some people expecting us in New York,” said Rudolph.

“I see,” Boylan said.

“A party, no doubt. Young people.”

“Something like that.”

“Only natural,” Boylan said. “On a day like this.” He poured more champagne for the three of them. “Will you see your sister?”

“It’s at her house.” Rudolph lied to no man.

“Give her my best,” said Boylan. “I must remember to send a gift for her child. What is it again?”

“A boy.”

Rudolph had told him the day the child was born that it was a boy.

“A small piece of silver,” Boylan said, “for it to eat its darling little porridge from. In my family,” Boylan explained to Brad, “the custom was to give a newly born boy a block of stock. But that was in the family, of course. It would be presumptuous of me to do anything like that for Rudolph’s nephew, although I’m very fond of Rudolph. For that matter, I’m quite attached to his sister, too, although we’ve allowed ourselves to drift apart in the last few years.”

“When I was born my father put an oil well in my name,” Brad said. “A dry hole.” He laughed heartily.

Boylan smiled politely. “It’s the thought that counts.”

“Not in Oklahoma,” Brad said.

“Rudolph,” Boylan said, “I had thought we could discuss various matters quietly over dinner, but since you’re busy, and I understand very well you want to be among young people your own age on a night like this, perhaps you could spare a minute or two now …”

“If you want,” Brad said, “I’ll take a little walk.”

“You are sensitive, Mr. Knight,” Boylan said, a knife-flick of mockery in his voice, “but there’s nothing that has to be hidden between Rudolph and me. Is there, Rudolph?”

“I don’t know,” Rudolph said bluntly. He wasn’t going to play whatever game Boylan was setting up.

“I’ll tell you what I’ve done,” Boylan said, businesslike now. “I’ve bought you a round-trip ticket on the Queen Mary. The sailing is in two weeks, so you’ll have plenty of time to see your friends and get your passport and make whatever arrangements are necessary. I’ve drawn up a little itinerary of places I think you ought to see, London, Paris, Rome, the usual. Round off your education a bit. Education really begins after college. Don’t you agree, Mr. Knight?”

“I can’t do that,” Rudolph said. He put his glass down.

“Why not?” Boylan looked surprised. “You’re always talking about going to Europe.”

“When I can afford it,” Rudolph said.

“Oh, is that all?” Boylan chuckled tolerantly. “You misunderstand. It’s a gift. I think it’ll do you good. Rub off the provincial edges a bit, if you don’t mind my saying so. I might even come over sime time in August and join you in the south of France.” “Thanks, no, Teddy,” Rudolph said. “I can’t.”

“I’m sorry.” Boylan shrugged, dismissing the matter. “Wise men know when to accept gifts and when to turn them down. Even dry holes.” With a nod for Brad. “Of course, if you have something better to do …”

“I have something to do,” Rudolph said. Here it comes, he thought.

“May I inquire what it is?” Boylan poured himself more champagne, without attending to the other glasses.

“I’m starting work tomorrow at Calderwood’s on a full-time basis,” Rudolph said.

“Poor boy,” Boylan said. “What a dreary summer lies ahead of you. I must say your tastes are curious. Preferring to sell pots and pans to sleazy small-town house-wives to going to the south of France. Ah, well, if that’s your decision, you must have your reasons. And after the summer—have you decided to go to law school as I suggested, or to make a stab at the Foreign Service examinations?”

For more than a year now, Boylan had on many occasions urged Rudolph to opt for one or another profession, with Boylan’s preference for the law. “For a young man with no assets but his personality and his wits”—Boylan had written him—“the law is the way to power and preference. This is a lawyer’s country. A good one often becomes indispensable to the companies which hire him. Frequently he finds himself in positions of command. We live in an intricate age, which is daily becoming more intricate. The lawyer, the good lawyer, finally is the only trusted guide through the intricacies and he is rewarded accordingly. Even in politics … Look at the percentage of lawyers in the Senate. Why shouldn’t you crown your career that way? God knows the country could use a man of your intelligence and character instead of some of those dishonest clowns who bumble away on Capitol Hill. Or consider the Foreign Service. Whether we like it or not, we master the world, or should. We should put our best men in positions where they can influence our actions and the actions of our friends and enemies.”

Boylan was a patriot. Out of the mainstream himself, through sloth or fastidiousness, he still had strong and virtuous opinions about the conduct of public life. The one man in Washington Rudolph had heard Boylan praise was James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy. “If you were my own son—Boylan had continued—“I wouldn’t give you different advice. In the Foreign Service you wouldn’t be highly paid, but you would live the life of a gentleman among gentlemen and you could do us all honor. And there would be nothing to prevent you from marrying well and moving on to an ambassadorship. Whatever help I could give you, I would give gladly. I would be rewarded enough if you invited me to the Embassy for lunch once every few months—and could say to myself that in a little way I made it possible.”

Remembering all this, and remembering Calderwood glaring at the photograph of his three daughters that same afternoon, Rudolph thought, feeling oppressed, everybody is looking for a son. A son in some private, particular, impossible image.

“Well, Rudolph,” Boylan was saying, “you haven’t answered me. Which is it going to be?”

“Neither,” Rudolph said. “I told Calderwood I’d stay on at the store for a year at least.”

“I see,” Boylan said flatly. “You don’t aim very high, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” Rudolph said. “In my own way.”

“I’ll cancel the booking for Europe,” Boylan said. “I won’t keep you from your friends any longer. It has been very nice having you here, Mr. Knight. If you ever happen to get away from Oklahoma again, you must come visit me again with Rudolph.” He finished his champagne and went out of the room, his tweed jacket impeccably on his shoulders, the silk scarf a flash of color about his neck.

“Well …” Brad said. “What was that all about?”

“He once had something to do with my sister,” Rudolph said. He started toward the door.

“Chilly bastard, isn’t he?”

“No,” Rudolph said. “Far from it. Let’s get out of here.”

As they drove through the gateway, Brad finally spoke. “There’s something funny about the feller’s eyes. What the hell is it? The skin looks as though—as though—” He puzzled for the exact words he wanted. “As though it’s zippered up at the sides. Hey, you know something—I bet that feller just had his face lifted.”

Of course, Rudolph thought. That was it. It wasn’t all that sleep down South. “Maybe,” he said. “Anything is possible with Teddy Boylan.”

Who are all these people, she thought, looking around her own living room. “Drinks in the kitchen,” she said gaily to a new couple who had just come through the open door. She’d have to wait till Willie came back to get the names. He had gone down to the bar on the corner for more ice. There always was enough Scotch, bourbon, gin, and red wine in half gallon jugs, but never enough ice.

There were at least thirty people in the room, about half of whom she knew, and more to come. How many more she never knew. Sometimes she had the feeling Willie just picked people up in the street and invited them. Mary Jane was in the kitchen, acting as barmaid. Mary Jane was getting over her second husband and you had to invite her to everything. Feeling herself an object of pity, Mary Jane tried to pay her way by helping out with the drinks, rinsing glasses, emptying ashtrays and taking lone stragglers home to bed with her. You needed somebody like that at a party.

Gretchen winced as she watched a Brooks Brothers type let ashes drop onto the floor and a moment later grind the stub of his cigarette into the carpet with his heel. The room looked so pretty when there was nobody in it, pale-rose walls, books in order on the shelves, curtains crisp, the hearth of the fireplace swept, cushions plumped, the wood polished.

She was afraid that Rudolph disapproved of the party, although there was nothing in his manner that showed that he did. As always, when he was in the same room with Johnny Heath, they were off in a corner together, Johnny doing most of the talking and Rudolph most of the listening. Johnny was only about twenty-five, but he was already a partner in a broker’s office in Wall Street, and was reputed to have made a fortune on his own in the stock market. He was an engaging, soft-spoken young man, his face modest and conservative, his eyes quick. She knew that from time to time Rudolph came down to the city to have dinner with Johnny or go to a ball game with him. Whenever she happened to overhear what they were talking about, it was always the same thing—stock deals, mergers, new companies, margins, tax-shelters, all supremely boring to Gretchen, but seemingly fascinating to Rudolph, although he certainly wasn’t in any position to deal in stock, merge with anybody, or form any kind of company.

Once, when she asked Rudolph why he had picked Johnny, of all the people he had met in her house, to latch onto, Rudolph replied, very seriously, “He’s the only friend you have who can educate me.”

Who could know her own brother? Still, she hadn’t meant to have this kind of party for Rudolph’s graduation night and Willie had agreed. But somehow, it always turned out to be the same kind of party. The cast changed somewhat, actors, actresses, young directors, magazine writers, models, girls who worked for Time, Inc., radio producers, an occasional man from an advertising agency who could not be insulted; women like Mary Jane who had just been divorced and told everybody that their husbands were fags, instructors at NYU or Columbia who were writing novels, young Wall Street men who looked as though they were slumming, a dazzlingly sensual secretary who would flirt with Willie after the third drink; an ex-pilot from Willie’s war who would corner her to talk about London; somebody’s discontented husband who would try to make a pass at her late in the evening, and who would probably slip out at the end with Mary Jane.

Even though the cast changed the activity remained almost the same. Arguments about Russia and Alger Hiss and Senator Joe McCarthy, intellectual girls with bangs praising Trotsky … (“Drinks in the kitchen,” she said gaily to a new couple, sunburned, who had obviously been to the beach that day) … somebody who had just discovered Kierkegaard or who had met Sartre and had to tell about it, or who had just been to Israel or Tangier and had to tell about it. Once a month would have been fine. Or if they just didn’t drop their ashes all over the room, even twice a month. They were by and large handsome and educated young people, all somehow with enough money to dress well and buy each other drinks and take a place in the Hamptons for the best part of the summer. Just the sort of people she had dreamed would be her friends when she was a girl in Port Philip. But she had been surrounded by them for nearly five years now. Drinks in the kitchen. The endless party.

Looking purposeful, she made her way to the staircase and started up toward the room under the roof where Billy slept. After Billy was born, they had moved to the top floor of an old brownstone on West Twelfth Street and had converted the attic into a large room and put in a skylight. Aside from Billy’s bed and his toys, there was a big table on which Gretchen worked. There was a typewriter on it and it was piled with books and papers. She liked working in the same room with young Billy and the sound of her typing didn’t bother him, but seemed to serve as a kind of clicking lullaby for him. A child for the machine age, soothed by Remington.

When she turned on the table lamp, she saw that he wasn’t asleep now, though. He lay in the small bed in his pajamas, a cloth giraffe on the pillow beside him, his hands moving above his head slowly through the air, as though to make patterns in the cigarette smoke that drifted up from below. Gretchen felt guilty about the cigarette smoke but you couldn’t ask people not to smoke because a four-year-old boy on another floor might not like it. She went over to the bed and leaned down and kissed Billy’s forehead. There was the clean smell of soap from his bath and the sweet aroma of childish skin.

“When I grow up,” he said, “I am not going to invite anybody.”

Not your father’s child, Gretchen thought. Even though he looked exactly like him, blond, serenely dimpled. NoJordache there at all. Yet. Unless her brother Thomas had looked like that as a child. She kissed him again, leaning low over the bed. “Go to sleep, Billy,” she said.

She went over to the work table and sat down, grateful to be out of the chatter of the room below. She was sure nobody would miss her, even if she sat up there all night. She picked up a book that was lying on the table. Elementary psychology. She opened it idly. Two pages devoted to the blots of the Rorschach test. Know thyself. Know thine enemy. She was taking extension courses at NYU in the late afternoons and at night. If she stuck at it she would have her degree in two years. She had a nagging sense of inadequacy that made her shy with Willie’s educated friends and sometimes with Willie himself. Besides, she liked classrooms, the unhurried sense that she was among people who were not merely interested in money or position or being seen in public.

She had slipped away from the theater after Billy was born. Later, she had told herself, when he’s old enough not to need me all the time. By now she knew she would never try to act again. No loss. She had had to look for work that she could do at home and luckily she had found it, by the simplest of means. She had begun by helping Willie write his criticisms of radio and later television programs, whenever he was bored with them or busy doing something else or had a hangover. At first, he kept signing his name to her pieces, but then he was offered an executive job in the office of the magazine at a raise in pay and she had begun signing the pieces herself. The editor had told her privately that she wrote a lot better than Willie, but she had made her own judgment on Willie’s writing. She had come across the first act of his play one day, while cleaning out a trunk. It was dreadful. What was funny and bright in Willie’s speech turned arch on paper. She hadn’t told him her opinion of his writing or that she had read his play. But she had encouraged him to take the executive job in the office.

She glanced at the sheet of yellow paper in the typewriter. She had penciled in a tentative title. “The Song of the Salesman.” She glanced at random down the page. “The innocent air,” she had written, “which theoretically is a national asset, the property of all Americans, has been delivered to merchants, so that they may beguile us or bully us into buying their products, whether the products are benevolent, needful, or dangerous to us. They sell us soup with laughter, breakfast food with violence, automobiles with Hamlet, purgatives with drivel …”

She frowned. Not good enough. And useless, besides. Who would listen, who would act? The American people were getting what they thought they wanted. Her guests downstairs were most of them in one way or another living off the thing their hostess was denouncing above their heads. The liquor they were drinking was bought with money earned by a man singing the salesman’s song. She tore the sheet of paper from the machine and balled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. She would never get it printed, anyway. Willie would see to that.

She went over to the child’s bed. He had fallen asleep, grasping the giraffe. He slept, miraculously complete. What are you going to buy, what are you going to sell when you are my age? What errors are ahead of you? How much of love will be wasted?

There was a tread on the stairs and she hurriedly bent over, pretending to be tucking in the child. Willie, provider of ice, opened the door. “I wondered where you were,” he said.

“I was restoring my sanity,” she said.

“Gretchen,” he said reproachfully. He was a little flushed from drink and there were beads of perspiration on his upper lip. He had begun to bald, the forehead more Beethovenesque than ever, but somehow he still looked adolescent. “They’re your friends, as well as mine.”

“They’re nobody’s friends,” Gretchen said. “They’re drinkers, that’s all.” She was feeling bitchy. Rereading the lines from her article had crystallized the dissatisfaction that had sent her upstairs in the first place. And, suddenly, she was annoyed that the child resembled Willie so closely. I was there, too, she wanted to say.

“What do you want me to do,” Willie said, “send them home?”

“Yes. Send them home.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Willie said. “Come on down, honey. People’ll begin to wonder what’s wrong with you.”

“Tell them I had a sudden wild urge to breast-feed,” Gretchen said. “In some tribes they breast-feed children until the age of seven. They know everything down there. See if they know that.”

“Honey …” He came over and put his arms around her. She could smell the gin. “Give a little. Please. You’re getting awfully nervy.”

“Oh. You noticed.”

“Of course I noticed.” He kissed her cheek. A nothing kiss, she thought. He hadn’t made love to her in two weeks. “I know what’s wrong,” he said. “You’re doing too much. Taking care of the kid, working, going to school, studying …” He was always trying to get her to drop her courses. “What’re you proving?” he had asked. “You’re the smartest girl in New York as it is.”

“I’m not doing half enough,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go down and pick a likely candidate and go off and have an affair. For my nerves.”

Willie dropped his arms from around her waist and stepped back, martinis receding. “Funny. Hah-hah,” he said coldly.

“On to the cockpit,” she said, putting out the lamp on the table. “Drinks are in the kitchen.”

He grabbed her wrist in the dark. “What’ve I done wrong?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” she said. “The perfect hostess and her mate will now rejoin the beauty and chivalry of West Twelfth Street.” She pulled her arm away from his grasp and went down the stairs. A moment later Willie came down, too. He had stayed behind to plant a martini’d kiss on his son’s forehead.

She saw Rudolph had quit Johnny Heath and was in a corner of the room talking earnestly to Julie, who must have come in while she was upstairs. Rudolph’s friend, the boy from Oklahoma, Babbitt material, was laughing too hard over something that one of the executive secretaries had said. Julie had her hair up and was wearing a soft, black-velvet dress. “I am in a constant battle,” Julie had confided to her, “to suppress the high-school cheerleader in me.” This evening she had managed. Too well. She looked too sure of herself for a girl that young. Gretchen was certain that Julie and Rudolph had never slept with each other. After five years! Inhuman. There was something wrong with the girl, or Rudolph, or both.

She waved to Rudolph but she did not catch his eye and as she went toward him she was stopped by an advertising account executive, too beautifully dressed, and with a haircut that was too becoming. “Mine hostess,” the man said, thin as an English actor. His name was Alec Lister. He had started as a page boy at CBS, but that was long behind him. “Let me congratulate you on an absolutely splendid do.”

“Are you a likely candidate?” she asked, staring at him.

“What?” Lister transferred his glass uneasily from one hand to another. He was not used to being asked puzzling questions.

“Nothing,” she said. “Train of thought, I’m glad you like the animals.”

“I like them very much.” Lister put his imprimatur firmly on the assemblage. “I’ll tell you something else I like. Your pieces in the magazine.”

“I will be known as the Samuel Taylor Coleridge of radio and television,” she said. Lister was one of the guests who could not be insulted, but she was out after all scalps tonight.

“What was that?” He was puzzled for the second time in thirty seconds and he was beginning to frown. “Oh, yes, I get it.” He didn’t seem happy to have gotten it. “If I may make a comment, Gretchen,” he said, knowing that anywhere between Wall Street and Sixtieth Street he could make whatever comment he pleased, “the pieces are excellent, but just a little bit too—well—biting, I find. There’s a tone of hostility in them—it gives them a welcome tang, I have to admit—but there’s a general underlying feeling of being against the whole industry …”